' ' Cinema Romantico: Giving Thanks

Thursday, November 23, 2017

Giving Thanks

It’s Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving is the time here in these quasi-United States when we are not so much happily willing to give thanks for our many blessings as OBLIGATED to give thanks for our many blessings dammit, as our nation’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda cheerily reminded us on Monday. And Cinema Romantico can think of fewer blessings more exultant than reaction shots and Nicole Kidman. Each of these blessings is exultant on its own, of course, but they are that much better when rolled into one, like they were earlier in 2017 on an episode of Ellen when Giada De Laurentiis, Food Network’s own, was enlisted to show the titular host and her most prominent guest that episode, Kidman, how to concoct fennel and clementine pizza.

It, uh, did not go well. And on a day where everyone sits down to give thanks just before stuffing themselves with scrumptious food, well, we here at Cinema Romantico would like to give thanks for a bout of food that wasn’t so scrumptious, as Ms. Kidman, her eminence, memorably demonstrated with the greatest reaction shot of 2017, perhaps of the new century.

In a year where so much of everything to a person of a certain disposition has been awful, and so many seem totally fine with everything being awful — and getting more awful still by the day, hour, minute, tweet — just so long as they get to laugh and point at people of a certain disposition feeling sorrow toward this unfolding calamity, your as-ever astonishing artistry, Ms. Kidman, in communicating to the whole wide world how that bite of food you just ate was awful to the extreme became nothing short of the ultimate blessing. Thank you.


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